Markdown Text Document Format

What is Markdown

Markdown is a way to style text on the web. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters thrown in, like # or *.

Markdown lets you compose posts and comments with links, lists, and other styles using regular characters and punctuation marks. Markdown is used by writers and bloggers who want a quick and easy way to style their text, without having to take their hands off the keyboard, and without learning a lot of complicated codes and shortcuts.

Markdown History

Markdown was created by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz in 2004 as a solution for easily composing richly formatted text on the web.

Where you can use Markdown

You can use Markdown on your WordPress.com blog for posts, pages and comments. see for more details.

Markdown syntax is also the used by GitHub repository as explained in the Markdown guide.

Markdown is commonly used for API documentation, technical note and ebook.
You can write an entire eBook using Markdown and the publishing it in any other format like HTML, PDF,MOBI, ePUB …GibBook is offering publication service fo free. Many others do under some fee.

Why You should use Markdown

Although Markdown is not (yet) standardized it’s wide spread and it employs plain text only and is based on conventions established in the computer and technology industry for writing emails and other documents with limited resources.

In plain text documents, the text you see on the screen represents all the information in the file, with essentially no formatting or other data hidden from view. Plain text documents have been used for decades for their simplicity, portability, and reliability. You can probably still open and edit any plain text document from the past 40 years in any computing device available today.